“The decision by the National Science Board is great news for U.S. science and especially for all of those who have been working on the LSST,” said Fred Gilman, dean of Carnegie Mellon University’s Mellon College of Science and chair of the AURA Management Council for the LSST (AMCL) that oversees the project. “The LSST, along with other large scale surveys like the current Sloan Digital Sky Survey, will place U.S.-based researchers at the forefront of cosmological research for the coming decades, providing data to probe the nature of dark energy.”

Construction on the LSST is hoped to begin in 2014 atop Cerro Pachón, a mountain in Northern Chile. When fully operational, the 8.4-meter telescope will use its 3 billion-pixel camera to survey the entire visible sky in multiple colors. The telescope will take snapshots every 15 seconds, creating a movie that will allow researchers to study objects that change or move on rapid timescales, like exploding supernovae, potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids, and distant Kuiper Belt Objects. The images will also be used to trace millions of remote galaxies and to help answer questions about dark matter and dark energy.